1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to information processing and more particularly to a method and apparatus for summarizing and indexing the contents of an audiovisual presentation.
2. Description of the Related Art
Formal presentations serve an important and popular means of communication. In academia and industry, the capture of such presentations for subsequent online viewing has become routine for applications such as distance-learning and technical training. Recording the seminars and placing the content online provides users the benefits of anywhere, anytime, and anyone viewing due to the ubiquitous nature of the Internet. Additionally, seminars having multiple presentations running concomitantly, force an individual to make a choice to attend one of the multiple presentations, when the individual may desire to attend more than one of the concomitant presentations.
Previous work on automatic video summarization may be characterized to fall into one of three broad areas: segmentation, analysis, and presentation. Segmentation involves the partitioning of a frame of video. For the domain of audio-visual presentations, segmentation requires consideration of changing lighting conditions, speaker movements, and camera pan/zooms. One of the shortcomings of the available techniques that segment audio-visual presentations is the inability to effectively handle the changing lighting conditions, speaker movements, and camera pan/zooms. Furthermore, there are no available techniques that are capable of indexing the audio visual content once the content is segmented, nor are there any techniques for summarizing the content for easy retrieval by a user. The problems become more acute when a user is accessing the video data through a handheld device with limited computational resources.
As a result, there is a need to solve the problems of the prior art to enable automatic indexing and an effective scheme for summarizing the content of an audiovisual presentation that enables a user to efficiently locate desired information.